Why is [UBI] being discussed now?
Well, the truth of it is, and this is very important, because there are now fears that
we are about to enter into another period of time when capitalism as an economic system
brings us technical improvements, things that make it easier for human beings to produce
goods and services, but the by-product is unemployment.
Today the most fanciful ideas are raised that artificial intelligence and the computer and
robots, you put all that together, and there have been estimates that something like 47%
of jobs that exist today will not be there 10 or 20 years from now because they will
have been automated out of existence, the way computers have automated lots of jobs,
the way machines automated lots of jobs, and so on.
And the great fear is that capitalism as a system that seems to accompany technological
advance with plunging masses of people into unemployment, which by the way is a profound
criticism of capitalism, and the idea is "Oh my god, masses of people without work?
Masses of people that therefore have no income?
They will become a threat to the system itself out of their misery and their deprivation
and something has to be done."
And whoops, here we go, we get welfare ideas but we also get UBI, Universal Basic Income,
as a way at least to pacify these people, to give them enough that they don't have the
rage of extreme poverty that might threaten the system.
Well, let's talk about this a little bit.
Is it really necessary to have this conversation?
Whatever you think about the goods or bads of doing something like this, here is a fundamental
question: do we have to have a system, an economic system, in which the good thing,
technological advance, being able with less effort by human beings to do produce as much
or more that used to take much more effort.
When we have technical change and we can make human beings more productive, meaning that
we don't have to put as much time and trouble and toil and effort and sweat into producing
the goods that we need to consume, is there a way to take advantage of that that doesn't
throw large numbers of people out of work and, in a way, make them expendable, throw
them out of the economic system so that we're worried about them, hopefully on the humanitarian
basis.
My goodness technological advance, through no fault of theirs, plunges them into unemployment.
Seems, on the face of it, immoral, unethical, and unfair.
And if on top of it, we say that it's inevitable that somehow if we're going to have progress
this is the price we pay, it leads us to ask a question, which I hope is in all of your
minds, could we not have an economic system that was able to capture the benefits of technological
change, that was devoted and interested in finding productivity increases but that didn't
have to accompany that good thing with a really bad one, namely the kinds of unemployment,
the kinds of deprivation, the kinds of poverty that leave human beings, well-intentioned
human beings, to think about welfare and to think about a Universal Basic Income.